I’ve read that the “I was spit on in the airport coming home” was a creation of the Nixon administration as a calumny against the antiwar movement. I wouldn’t put it past today’s Right to manufacture something even worse.
Well, the matter of this thread is about a certain group of people using a national tragedy to score political points. It is as though they are standing on the bodies of three thousand Americans shouting threats at people who disagree with them (which is not nearly so vile as the NC legislature Republicans, a couple years back, using 9/11 reverence to trick the Democrats into missing a major vote).
We are not using geopolitical events for point-scoring, we are using them to gain a more thorough understanding of the underlying vectors of terrorism (or at least we should be). And, really, I am seeing no one here trying to justify terrorism. If you are seeing that, please point it out.
A place to start re the spitting myth is here
Spitting on/insulting veterans is small potatoes compared to shitting on them at every turn by doing things like hobbling the VA. There was a popular movie released in 1970 (as Viet Nam was ongoing) that included a small but prominent segment that basically attacked the idea of PTSD, as General Patton cussed out a soldier for being a pussy and, by the tone movie, was treated sympathetically for it. Any Republican (official or just a supporter) who advocates military action needs to be called out as a piece of shit for the way they treat veterans.
Sorry, but in turn have to disagree with you. I feel that the Bush administration was looking for a reason to invade Iraq from Day One.
I feel there was a combination of reasons at work. The first Bush administration had accepted a limited victory in 1991 and the Clinton administration had been willing to maintain the status quo. The incoming Bush administration wanted to invade, have a complete victory, and prove they were better. The second big incentive was money. In addition to all the money that could be made from a war via military spending, there were a lot of influential people who saw opportunities in the post-war occupation of an oil-rich country like Iraq.
The 9/11 attacks were a major obstacle in these plans for Iraq. The Bush administration had a much harder time convincing people we needed to invade Iraq when we were already involved in a war in Afghanistan.
I feel therefore that if there hadn’t been a 9/11 attack and an unwanted war with Afghanistan, the Bush administration would have had an easier time starting the war with Iraq that they wanted. They would have just leaned even harder on the story that Saddam was building WMD’s as their excuse.
Don’t assume general military superiority makes you invulnerable to attack. Don’t assume other countries are going to follow your plans. Don’t assume military technology is unchanging.
If we had learned all those things before December 7, 1941 then there wouldn’t have been a Pearl Harbor attack. We obviously had not learned them. So the memory of the terrible consequences we faced for not learning them might help us avoid making those same mistakes again.
I agree with you that just remembering an event occurred doesn’t mean you’ve learned any useful lessons from that event. But not remembering an event isn’t going to teach you any lessons from it either. Studying history is the necessary first step to learning from history.
I don’t know about the “baited the United States into the MIddle East” part. Sure, he accomplished that, but was it a victory?
I mean, the US moved into Iraq for the better part of a decade, and as a result, the troops there were sort of a lightning rod for Islamic insurgents, versus those people attacking the US or Western Europe. Seems like a winning proposition to me in the long view. Who cares if they blew up some stuff in Iraq trying to get to the US soldiers stationed there? Especially if it means they’re distracted from planning terrorist attacks on the US proper?
That said, I agree about the more authoritarian part, and worse, it was a large part of what we’re currently facing w.r.t. the Republican party. 9/11 gave all the loons and crazies a voice, when before that they looked like loons and paranoids.
Except it isn’t. The OP is an admonishment that we are having observances about 9/11 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic where more people by orders of magnitude have died. There’s nothing there about those who use the observances for political purposes. It’s basically just “we should care more about the far more people dying now.”
@madmonk28 is engaging in equivocation by comparing US drone strikes which took out actual terrorist militants but had some collateral damage with the intentional attack on civilians perpetrated on 9/11/2001. Attacks on legitimate military targets are different than attacks on known civilians, who you knew were not actively involved in the conflict.
There is obviously value in looking at what events led up to 9/11. But the pendulum swings too far the other way when we start ignoring the differences in different situations so that we can push a “both sides are just as bad” narrative.
I get why someone might consider the latter to come off as trolling. It’s just so obviously not the same.
Your understanding of history is incomplete. Frankie put a fuel embargo on Japan on the basis of their adventurism in Asia (as they were going after China, the Philippines and much of SEA), over the objections of America First, which promoted absolute neutrality. It was that embargo, restricting the Japanese from obtaining the fuel they needed to support their imperialism, that ultimately goaded them into attacking.
In other words, the US government, under the management of FDR, literally caused Japan to attack. It was not as unexpected as we have been taught (apart from knowing which target they would hit).
Not to mention we and several European nations had nice little empires of our own, which extended well into Japan’s sphere of influence.
I would agree that there’s limited value in cataloguing all of the misdeeds of the U.S., particularly when they get taken out of context. As we’ve probably discussed before, in many of the examples mentioned on this thread, the U.S. was competing with other world powers for supremacy. Moreover, historically speaking, the cold hard fact is that power vacuums don’t exist for long. If the U.S. fades, someone else will step in and become the apex predator.
But I also think it’s fair to ask if we couldn’t be better at this, if world powers can’t be more humane, more cooperative instead of competitive. The fact that competition is inevitable doesn’t mean that we can’t make progress. Over time, humanity eventually developed a formal respect for sovereignty, and more recently, a petition for human rights, and of democracy (to varying degrees).
Going back to the OP more directly, I think Americans miss the point with most of our observances of and reverences with respect to past tragedies. We need to ask ourselves, what are our values? As it relates to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, the canned response is almost always “freedom.” - We were attacked for our freedom. We went to war to defend freedom.
I frankly disagree. Freedom isn’t necessarily an American value, I’m sorry to say. A nation that enshrines slavery into its still living, breathing Constitution doesn’t get to claim that freedom is its value. A nation that needed to go to war and kill 600,000 of its own citizens, that was forced to deny congressional seats to Southern legislators in order to pass the Civil War Amendments (13, 14, and 15), that was then forced to make concessions to white supremacists that one half the country would live in a state of apartheid after the war, and that took another 100 years before it finally, formally upheld equal protection under the laws, doesn’t get to claim liberty as its value. A nation that essentially exported its own brand of colonialism in East Asia and the Americas, that supported South African apartheid, that helped overthrow multiple democratically-supported regimes worldwide, that actively supported thuggish dictators, and that helped Islamism spread to Pakistan and Afghanistan, doesn’t get to claim that freedom is a cherished value.
Our value isn’t freedom per se, but rather free markets. Our value isn’t individual liberty; it’s private power over public interest. That is a fact. That explains why we’ve long valued states rights, corporatism, and inequality, and why we’ve tried to limit what the federal government (and government at any level) can do to promote the public interest and welfare. And we’ve exported those same values to other countries, which understandably pisses them off.
Maybe it’s time that Americans really reflect on our values, instead of just reciting jingoistic slogans and swallowing dogma. We might actually improve the quality of our own lives at home and make the need for mortal combat abroad (or hell, even at home) a lot less likely going forward.
Get the fuck over yourself, you pompous douche. Many of our drone strikes killed nothing but civilians, most recently at the Kabul airport. We kill them with our military, they lack the military resources to do the same, so they use terrorism.
I look forward to not reading your eight paragraph response.
Obviously 9/11 was nasty business. Sadly it pales in comparison to the atrocities committed by the US government and it’s people, not only abroad, but to it’s own citizens. Over & over again.
So sad that many families lost innocent loved ones on this date. So sad for the thousands upon thousands of others at home and around the world who have also suffered such losses. It’s a club that nobody wishes to be a member of.
It’s interesting to travel the world and meet different people in various countries. Most are just working stiffs trying to get by. They’re friendly and most are more than willing to help a traveler unaccustomed to their ways.
Greed & control is where we get into trouble. There are those that need it like a drug and they don’t care who suffers on their way to achieving more & more of it. It’s these people that are the problem. They are typically (not all) political ‘leaders’ & business ‘leaders’. The only thing they’re leading is our planet into destruction. All for their own gratification. And in the end, they’ll be dead like the rest of us. In the meantime we’re all nothing more than pawns for them. That’s what needs to change.
Well said. And if that doesn’t work out, we can always have a SUPERMEGABLOWOUTMAJORAPPLIANCESALEATHON!!!
I agree with the OP and, for context:
As you might imagine, there is still a big Pearl Harbor remembrance ceremony at Pearl Harbor itself each year. Hardly national though.
That’s what’s always gotten me about Memorial Day. Each year, I find myself indebted to those valiant souls who gave their lives so I can get a good deal on a new mattress.
Perhaps the best way to memorialize those who gave their lives for causes of varying worth is by best living the lives we have in their stead? In which case, blow out sales and beach barbecues seem about right.
We’re having memorial events at my high school. None of the students were even born, but it’s important that we have these memorials because “the events of 9/11 still shape the world they live in”.
No. No, they don’t. What still shapes the world they live in is all of the memorial events to 9/11 that people insist on. Maybe, just maybe, if we stopped teaching everyone that the Muslim world is The Enemy, they wouldn’t be. OK, realistically, it’d take more than that, but that’s a necessary first step.
Here is what I tried to post on my community Facebook page. The admins wouldn’t allow it.
We were traveling southbound on I-95 yesterday afternoon at around 5:00 p.m. We could see from the distance the large group of flag-wavers gathered on the Mountain Road overpass. On the other northbound side, we saw what looked like a serious accident just below the overpass for those northbound travelers. As we drove, we could see that the back-up stretched for miles.
My question: did one thing cause the other? Despite the good intentions, is this really the best place to create a large visual distraction to motorists traveling at 70+ mph, who would be then tempted to slow down, to wave and -who knows?- even take a picture and in doing so, create a significant driving hazard.
I was only driving by so this is unconfirmed speculation on my part but for anyone who was there and witnessed the scene, care to weigh in as to what happened?
To fill in the blanks, it seems a large group of people gathers every year and assembles on an overpass on Interstate 95. I’m relatively certain that with drivers slowing down, waving at the mass gathered above, honking their horns in support is what caused the accident. I’m also certain that the group fails to see the connection and will be out there in the same spot next year.